


finding the way (from me to you)

by The_Wavesinger



Category: Original Work
Genre: City Witch - Freeform, F/F, Magic, Nature Witch, Opposites Attract
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 16:12:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16287743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Wavesinger/pseuds/The_Wavesinger
Summary: A nature witch meets a city witch at the Witches' Symposium.





	finding the way (from me to you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).



Okay. So. The thing is.

The thing is, Kamalanetra hadn't meant to fall in love with Eshani. But meeting at the annual Witches’ Symposium had been...an experience.

Kamalentra had been sick that day, but she had really really wanted to be there so she went anyway. And then she sneezed a cloud of flowers onto another witch.

Who, of course, was Eshani, and who, of course, was a city witch. And she'd been in the middle of showing off (Eshani called it demonstrating, bit it was totally showing off) a delicate trick. And their magics has reacted, and they'd been stuck together for the next three days, both of them bright purple with orange spots in them.

Which, to be honest, was getting off lightly. No deaths, maimings, or otherwise gruesome side effects.  
  
At least Eshani was a healer, had known how to vanish her cold. She drew on Kamalentra’s strength to do it, but being exhausted for half a day was better than risking sneezing on Eshani again.  
  
And then…well. And then they had discovered that they were, in fact, _extremely_ attracted to each other. And then they’d had sex.

And Kamalanetra hasn’t seen Eshani since.

 

*

 

It’s stupid and silly to still be holding a torch for Eshani. Kamalentra doesn’t even know if that’s her real name. The Symposium is meant to me anonymous, and while more and more witches aren’t bothering to pretend not to have magic, there are still enough of them who remember times before the Rainfall, when the discovery of someone’s magic lead to almost-instant death. Kamalanetra had used a glamour and a fake name (she had been _Piyumi_ to Eshani), and she can’t be sure that Eshani—if her name is even Eshani—hadn’t done the same.

But she doesn’t have much to dwell on, not right now.

She’s riding to the city at the Chief Minister’s request, and she has all the time in the world to think and dream while the pallet she’s on and the strength of her magic carry her where she needs to go. And so Eshani is running through her mind, over and over again, on a loop. Not so much her face (it was an unremarkable, unlovely face—Kamalanetra might be smitten, but clear sight has always been her blessing and her curse), but her voice, her laughter and her silly, strange jokes and the way she spoke, measured and elegant but with a bubble of some kind of pure emotion always, always lurking behind it.

They had spent most of the time they had together in bed, wrapped around each other. And they did make love, yes, but more often, they talked.

Kamalanetra had been careful to be vague, even then, and so had Eshani. But they talked about the moon and sun and stars, about the heat of the earth and the whispers of darkness growing under the land in some strange dark plague that neither of them quite understood. And they talked about smaller things too, about the little bits of their lives they chose to reveal, and joked and laughed as they curled up in the large bed they’d managed to procure after realizing they were going to be stuck together for more than a couple of hours.

And they worked magic together. They did find themselves committing quite a few mishaps, but now quite as disastrous as that first meeting and the accidental interference. They learned each other more quickly than either of them anticipated, and the grooves of Eshani’s magic became familiar to Kamalanetra so quickly that she was afraid, sometimes, that she’d wake up to all of this being a dream. And yet—

And yet it was real in a way neither of them could ever properly dismiss, sharp and honest. The friction of their magics shouldn’t have _worked_ , and there should have been backfiring, explosions, more turning purple and other strange colors. Instead, the sparks as their respective magic worked against each other coalesced into something strange and new that Kamalanetra in her hundreds of years had never seen before.

Maybe it’s that Eshani is all raw power, the kind of power that will one day be what stories are made of. She’s young yet—Kamalanetra could tell that much—not even a full century old, where Kamalanetra is ten times that and more. Her magic has no delicacy, no finesse. Instead, it’s the kind of old magic that Eshani could only have through being the descendant of one of the old families. (And after all, she’s a city-witch. There’s more than a big chance that she’s of one of the lines of nobles that have had magic secretly running through their veins for millennia.)

It was a shock, then, once the sticking spell lifted its grip on them during the night of the third day, and Kamalanetra found herself, waking up, on the opposite side of the bed from Eshani.

It was just in time—the Symposium was ending that day, and Kamalanetra and her apprentice (who had spent the last week off somewhere with the younger witches, probably getting drunk on torra-spirits) had to go back to her forest before the most sentient of her trees, the darkest and oldest of them, decided to bar travelers from safe passage—but Kamalanetra found herself wishing that the spell could have never lifted.

They made love that morning, skipped the final events to wrap themselves around each other in bed. And still, when the time came to depart, Kamalanetra found herself wanting more, wanting to stay and hold on to Eshani and never let her go.

“I’ll find you,” Eshani whispered while they were still in bed.

And Kamalanetra laughed, because the country was wide and witches by their very nature were difficult to find, but—

But she wanted so desperately to believe Eshani. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

And now it’s been a full two years. And Kamalanetra has had other things on her mind—the darkness she’d felt very softly in the Symposium had been growing, and she can’t find the source. She knows other witches are worried, and she knows that the world is out of balance in a way she can’t understand.

Her apprentice is almost full-learned now, and being alone with the forest for as long as Kamalanetra is gone will be her final task before she’s ready to practice magic by herself. But working with her is nothing like working with Eshani, and Kamalanetra wishes more and more that Eshani was there.

But she isn’t, and Kamalanetra has learned to live with that. And now she’s going to the city to meet the Chief Minister. Thinking about Eshani isn’t going to help.

 

*

 

She’s let into the Chief Minister’s rooms by a servant in elaborate livery.

The Chief Minister’s back is turned to Kamalanetra, and she’s not at her heavy wooden desk but at the frosted window. Kamalanetra clears her throat, uncertain, and the Minister turns around.

“ _Eshani_?”

And yes, it’s Eshani. Kamalanetra would know her anywhere, with that voice and those eyes. The glamour is gone, now (or maybe it’s just another glamour, but Kamalanetra doesn’t really care either way), and she doesn’t look like Eshani anymore, but she _feels_ like her. Her magic is already leaping towards Kamalanetra’s.

And then Eshani smiles and says, “My name is actually Haimini,” and then Kamalanetra is taking a few steps and covering the last of the distance between them, and they’re clinging to each other like they’re the last people on earth finding each other after eons of being alone.

“I told you I’d find you,” Eshani—Haimini, really, _Haimini_ , Chief Minister and the Queen’s right hand, a witch and Eshani to boot—says, and Kamalanetra laughs, and her laughter turns into a quiet sob against Eshani’s shoulder.

 

*

 

At length, after many kisses and tears, they disentangle themselves from one another.

“You found me,” Kamalanetra says quietly.

Esh—Haimini laughs. “It took me some time, but I did. And—it’s so good to see you, and I would find you no matter what, but I called you here instead of coming to you for a reason.”

And in the back of her mind, Kamalanetra already knows. She’s known, in the back of her mind, why she was summoned ever since she got the summons, and knowing who the Chief Minister is doesn’t change the fact of that. “I know. And I will do whatever I can to help, I promise, but I’m a forest-witch. I know very little of what stirs beneath the surface of the land, and I don’t know where this rot is coming from.”

Haimini sighs. “Neither do I, but I have spoken to land-witches, and none of them know. And some of them don’t sense it, even now. But the two of us—” And she touches her fingertip to Kamalanetra’s, and Kamalanetra’s magic _dances_. “I think, maybe, that if we work together we might have a chance.”

A chance isn’t much. Kamalanetra can feel, even now, the oppressive weight of the darkness preying on the back of her mind. But it’s more than there was before, when it was just herself worrying with no path to walk along. And at least, now, Haimini is with her.

She’s not alone, and she’s found her lover. That’s enough for her even if the world ends tomorrow.


End file.
